Wildcard

by Rachel Lee

  Miriam fell silent and stared off into the night, seeing in her mind’s eye what could very well happen if Steve was right. On the other hand…

  “Steve?”

  “Yes?”

  “Does it bother you that you might have to destroy the truth?”

  “It bothers me, Miriam. It plagues my soul night and day. But if one long-forgotten truth must be sacrificed to save millions of lives, what can I do? I pray about it constantly. All I can do is trust that God will lead me to do his will. Otherwise, I’m lost. Religion can be a great tool for good, Miriam. But when turned, it can be a terrible force for evil.”

  As Miriam stretched out on the cool ground, she thought about all that Steve had told her. The pieces were there, and yet there was more. She didn’t think he had held back. The pain in his face had been too real. But there were pieces missing. Forces he had not mentioned. Forces for whom murder, even wholesale religious slaughter, was no deterrent. For whom such a tragedy might even be profitable.

  She wondered about the kind of heart that could believe so strongly in its own rightness that it would sacrifice millions of lives to pursue its ends. And what she could do to stop it.

  23

  Dos Pilas, Guatemala

  Steve Lorenzo watched the activity a mile away on the far side of the ruins and knew what he would have to do. She would hate him. But that, too, was part of the price.

  Miriam had heard what he’d said in terms of ideas and abstractions. But for Steve, no such gloss existed. He had spent years of his life in these jungles, watching blood spill and flow and ruin families. She’d had a taste of it yesterday, at the stream, but that was only a sampler of what he’d witnessed in his time here. Death stalked these mountains with the implacable silence of the jaguar, and it struck with equally cruel indifference.

  The realization had hit him after she’d fallen asleep. Their conversation had set his mind adrift over memories he wished God could somehow wipe from his mind, and he saw with utter clarity what the future of these people would be if the Kulkulcan Codex existed, and if it were revealed to the world.

  These people were safe only in their relative anonymity—such safety as they knew, anyway. Reveal to the world that their Kulkulcan had sprung from the same Biblical background as Christ and Muhammad, reveal that their prophet might not have been a myth or simply an out-of-step Mayan, but truly the grandson of the Christ, and it would not be tolerated. It would create too much guilt, and such guilt would be transformed into deep hatred.

  Armageddon might reach its ugly adulthood in the sands of the Holy Land, but its birth would be here, among these people. Long before all the religious posturing began over there, the blood would flow here. And like the ancient king, the enemies of these people would dance knee-deep in that blood, exulting in joy at the first threat removed, even as they knew the mortal danger had not passed.

  Memories of a future yet unborn flitted around him like stubborn moths. Paloma, her throat slit, left in a jungle to be eaten by the carrion crawlers. Miguel, any hope of a wife and family splattered over the rocks as bullets tore through his body. Rita and her children, eviscerated like their distant Mayan ancestors to appease new gods of vengeance and power.

  As the moths battered against his soul, a white-hot anger grew within him. Anger at a God who could permit such atrocities to be committed in his name. Anger at his believers, whose belief could not reach beyond their own earthly positions. Anger at himself, for the pride that made him think he was any different than the worst of the worst. He was just another white man bearing the white man’s burden, clumsily gouging at sawdust in others’ eyes because he could not see beyond the beams in his own.

  That ended right here, right now.

  But even as the angry thoughts filled him, he knew they were only cover for the real feelings that lay deeper. He had been betrayed. He had given his life to a church that had preached life but practiced death. The Church hadn’t begun the wars here. Paloma was right about that. But it had fed those wars, flowered in them, here and elsewhere, for century upon century, blood upon blood.

  And now it was going to happen again. He hadn’t been sent here to preserve a true faith. He’d been sent here to protect a power base. And in the machinations of religion and power, the lives of these people were a widow’s mite to be collected and banked with interest.

  He’d been sent here because these people trusted him. He’d been sent here to betray that trust. And he’d gone willingly, almost eagerly, believing in the rightness of his faith and mission. Looking around at the faces of the people he’d come to betray, he realized how wrong he had been for so much of his life. They deserved better than to join their forebears in a river of death.

  Miriam Anson was a beautiful dove of a soul, committed by nature and training and experience to the pursuit of truth and justice. But truth and justice would be ugly ideals in these mountains. Truth would kill these people, and others would call that justice.

  In the end, what mattered was not truth, or justice, but life. The lives that could be saved. The lives that would be lost.

  As he watched the fresh-faced people begin to set up their camp on the far side of the ruins, salvation reached down in the form of cold betrayal.

  He would loathe himself for what was coming next, but it had to be done.

  He returned to the village campsite and circulated among the others, quietly stirring them awake, shushing their questioning sounds, explaining what had to be done in whispered tones that drew shaking heads at first, then gave way to grudging nods. They could see it was the only way.

  Perhaps Miriam would see that someday, also.

  As he wrote the note and placed it on the ground beside her, he looked at her clear, quiet features. God had created beauty in her, and that beauty was owed more than this. But this was the best he could give her.

  Silently, he and his people began their bitter exodus, a journey to hide forever a truth that might kill them.

  Miriam awoke to the screams of macaws and the silence of an empty campsite. Her breath caught in her throat as she sat up and looked around. Even before she rose to search the area, she knew the truth. She had been abandoned.

  As a curse rose within her, she looked down at the paper lying on the ground, then picked it up and unfolded it.

  Miriam: I’m terribly sorry, but our paths must diverge here. On the far side of the ruins, you will find archeologists arriving to resume their work. There are Americans among them. I am sure they can get you back to safety. I wish we could walk together farther, but it cannot be. You want a justice that will never happen in this land, and the price of seeking that justice would be more than these people can bear. I know you are angry with me, but we must each follow our own journeys. I wish you peace. Steve.

  She savagely crushed the note in her hands. Then she rose and made her way into the ruins of a bloodstained city in a bloodstained land.

  Washington, D.C.

  Kevin Willis tossed back a Scotch and soda, and looked at the others around him in the bar. It was a government bar. Lawyers. Lobbyists. Legislative aides. Networks. Contacts. Connections. The lifeblood of democracy and government. Get along and go along.

  It had seemed so easy in the beginning. It was the way things were done. You need a source. Your source needs a source. You scratch. You get scratched. And you call it justice. It had been the same story on the streets of Chicago, when he’d needed informants to make cases. But here, in the shadows of marble monuments and the seat of weighty pronouncements, the stakes got higher.

  And the price got uglier.

  Tom Lawton was dead. He’d died because Kevin had decided to protect an informant. Oh, he could tell himself it was because Tom had gone off half-cocked on a case he’d been told to leave alone. But Kevin knew that was self-absolving bullshit. He’d known Tom Lawton. The man was a brilliant investigator. And stubborn. And feeling way too betrayed to trust in authority and follow orders.

  At some level
, Kevin had known Tom wouldn’t let it go. And he’d turned Tom Lawton loose among the wolves, alone, without any backup or official authority, without the protective mantle that sheltered every FBI field agent on assignment.

  The memorial service had been that afternoon in a small chapel often used by FBI agents for weddings—and funerals. It had been mercifully brief. Terry Tyson had flown up from Florida to attend, asking questions Kevin could not answer. Questions about Tom. Questions about Miriam. Questions about the investigation and the lack of notable progress. The accusation in Terry’s eyes had been unveiled—raw and direct and on target.

  Terry’s friend Grant Lawrence lay in a hospital bed, slipping in and out of a coma. The brilliant mind, the charismatic smile, the visionary who saw an America more beautiful than the one around him, all erased in the seconds it had taken a gunman to pull a trigger. A great man stilled. Perhaps forever.

  Terry’s lover, Miriam Anson, was lost in the jungles of Guatemala, captured by rebel forces during what ought to have been a simple arrest. She was a hero, according to the Guatemalan police. She had saved several lives by her quick thinking, training, leadership and courage. But she was gone, and Terry’s anger had burned hot every time he’d glanced at Kevin.

  And Tom Lawton, killed in an auto accident that had not been an accident. Forensics had confirmed that his brake line had been cleverly severed. The Boise police were on the case, but Kevin knew they would find nothing. No witnesses had seen the crash or the saboteur at work. It was another professional killing, the culprit as ephemeral as the cigarette smoke that hung in the bar. Seeing it was easy. Grasping it was impossible.

  Kevin knew Ed Morgan was involved. The coincidences were too great to ignore.

  Harrison Rice, the now certain Democratic nominee, was leading his opponent by a twelve-point margin, and that margin increased with every new body shipped back from the quagmire in the desert. Rice and Morgan were old friends. College roommates and fraternity brothers. Rice had been in Long Island, a guest at Morgan’s home, the day after Grant Lawrence was shot. The meeting hadn’t been covert; the wedding of a Morgan daughter had been a social splash, complete with paparazzi. If asked, Rice would simply say he’d been sharing his old friend’s joy. And there would be no way to prove otherwise.

  Morgan’s wife was married to Wes Dixon, the Idaho sheep rancher Tom had gone off to chase on his own. And Tom had been murdered—after Morgan had asked about him. Coincidence? Of course not. But with no witnesses and no leads, there was no trail to follow. Kevin had ordered surveillance on the Dixon ranch, but that had come to naught. Apparently the ranch had shut down, Wes Dixon and wife having left for a long-planned vacation in the Mediterranean.

  A trail of blood and money stretched from New York to Idaho to Florida, and Kevin knew he could no more take hold of it and shake the truth from it than he could shake the toxins out of the smoky barroom atmosphere.

  The worst of it was, he’d been used. He’d made the mistake of trusting a friend of a friend, a man who from time to time fed him information about the money networks behind Al Qaeda and other terrorist cells in the U.S. Those tips had been very good for Kevin Willis’s career. He’d risen through the ranks on the basis of his uncanny ability to track down sleepers in the most unlikely places, thanks to the help of West Point buddy Wes Dixon’s brother-in-law and his connections in the arcane and mysterious world of international banking.

  When Tom Lawton had tripped over the Idaho Freedom Militia in the FBI database, Kevin Willis had done what he thought was the sensible thing. He’d called his friend and informer, Ed Morgan, and asked him about it. He’d laughed along with Morgan at the patent absurdity of it. Morgan had given him a heads-up about a lead in Atlanta, a lead that had run dry, as leads sometimes do. In the meantime, Kevin had taken Tom off the case and sent Miriam to keep tabs on the investigation unfolding in Guatemala.

  In that act he’d sentenced Tom Lawton to death, and very possibly Miriam Anson, as well.

  When Terry Tyson had looked into his eyes at the memorial service, Kevin had had to look away. The accusation was clear. And he could do nothing but silently admit his guilt.

  He’d tried to catch up with Tyson after the service, as they filed out, but the huge black man wouldn’t speak with him. He’d walked out, stiff and silent and full of righteous anger, and Kevin had known there wasn’t a damn thing he could say to change any of it.

  Three shots of Scotch hadn’t dimmed the pain. They hadn’t even taken the edge off. The more he pondered the world he had let himself walk into, the more he felt tempted to drive off to Rock Creek Park and eat his service weapon.

  But a part of him rebelled at that notion, and he clung to that painful part with the desperation of a man on the edge of a cliff. One more death wouldn’t wipe the slate clean.

  He would have to do, and be, what he should have done and been from the beginning. It was time to take his own blinders off and recognize his responsibilities. Old friendships and profitable connections be damned. Because after the networks and contacts and whispered words were swept away, there was still a man lying in a hospital bed in Tampa, a woman lost in Guatemala, and a man dead in Idaho.

  Those were not vague or ephemeral things. They were human beings whose lives he had darkened by his own ambition. And they were crimes he could avenge.

  It took a long moment for him to notice the cell phone purring at his belt. He pushed the button and held the phone to his ear, pressing his finger in his other ear to hear above the dim but insistent babble of deals being made and promises broken.

  “Willis.”

  “Kevin, it’s me. Miriam. I’m in Guatemala City, at the airport, waiting for a flight. We need to talk. And not at the office.”

  Sometimes, Kevin thought, a providence divine or otherwise reached down into the darkness of the human soul and lit a single candle.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at Dulles. A lot has happened.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Tom…” His voice caught, and for the first time all day, tears fell on his cheeks.

  “Oh, God, no,” Miriam said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “They killed him.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” he said. “They did.”

  “I’ll be there in six hours,” she said, a hardness in her voice that he had never heard before. “I’m going to get them, Kevin. However I can. Whatever it takes. You can say no all you want, but I’m going to do it.”

  Kevin looked at his fourth drink and pushed it aside. “I’m not going to say no.”

  24

  Grangeville, Idaho

  The sun hadn’t even risen when Renate took the pickup truck out behind the motel and gave it a good splotchy spray down with Rust-Oleum. Tom had to admit that only the license plate would give it away as the same pickup that had pulled in here yesterday.

  By six, with night still heavy on the world, they were sitting at the crossroads sipping hot coffee, and eating some egg and biscuit concoction that passed for food and was at least warm.

  The clerk at the diner had been kind enough to fill two steel thermos bottles with hot coffee for them and charge them for only two large coffees. They were going to need it. This truck might run like a Ferrari, but if it had a working heater, he couldn’t feel it this morning. Both he and Renate had decided to don their snow pants and insulated vests.

  The truck was parked to one side of a run-down gas station and probably looked like a part of the local scenery. Just as the first light began to appear, the tour bus came rumbling up the highway and turned right onto U.S. 12.

  “I guess we’re going to Missoula,” Tom remarked.

  “It looks that way.” Renate gave the terrorists just enough time to disappear around a bend in the road, then took off after them.

  Yesterday’s meltwater had left the highway treacherous in places, coated with a thin sheath of ice, and they tended to fishtail.

  “They’r
e going to leave us in their dust,” Tom remarked.

  “I won’t let them.”

  That was what he’d been afraid she would say. However, since she’d apparently cut her teeth driving in the Bavarian Alps, he wasn’t going to get into an argument with her about it. Instead, he put away another biscuit and sipped more hot coffee. “Continued misdirection,” he remarked. “Do you think our happy campers are purposefully headed the wrong way?”

  “Happy campers?” She laughed. “I like that. We’ll call them that from now on. But yes, I think this is purposeful. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Guatemalans initially entered the country through Canada. U.S. Immigration, especially at the Mexican border, has become a serious hindrance for even the most casual tourist. Fingerprinting and all that.”

  Tom said nothing. He was aware of the tightening of immigration policies, and given the terrorist threat, he wasn’t necessarily opposed to it, even if it could be annoying for innocent people.

  “So,” she continued, as if his lack of response had gone unnoted, “these Guatemalans probably found it a great deal easier to come in by way of Canada.”

  “With the same problems at the border crossing.”

  She looked at him.

  He chuckled. “I guess I need more coffee. Yes, you’re right. The border is a sieve. Especially up there.”

  “Exactly. But this time I suspect they will choose a more difficult way to make their crossing.”

  “Why?”

  “Because their sentry was killed. They know someone is looking for them.”

  He couldn’t argue with that, not by any stretch of the imagination. Glancing through the windshield, he saw the bus taking a curve well ahead of them. So far, nobody was going terribly fast. He was glad of that, because he could distinctly sense that they were rising in altitude.

  A sign advised them that they were entering the Clearwater National Forest; then another sign announced the distance to Missoula: 172 miles.